RE: Anonymous voting and honesty in the choosing
I'm a big fan of putting control in the hands of the users. The way I see it; right now the user decides his level of public exposure when he's choosing his account name.
I've chosen to use my full name (although in fairness it's a pretty common combo).
Others use something completely obscure. You've picked a middle ground.
Others, like Aggy have a screen name, but publicly post their real name.
I'm sure many have multiple accounts, too.
So I could downvote one post in my own name, and another with my (non posting) mystery alt, which gives me the choice. If all votes and wallets were hidden, then I wouldn't have the option to do anything publicly = I don't have a choice.
There may be benefits to preventing a user from publicly voting, but if they wanted to they could comment. "I'll be up/down voting this post in the block after this comment", and tie their personal contribution/subtraction to their identity.
I'm sure a tool to automate that wouldn't be difficult to code.
Cost/benefit I just don't see the upside to anonymous voting tbh. That said, I'd be very interested to see how an anonymous SMT would work. The whole point is to experiment with ideas like this.
I don't think anonymous voting would be included on Steem, but if I mentioned it in an SMT alone, people wouldn't think that much about it, just push it out to "later". :)
There are pros and cons to it and one of the cons is that (if forced) anonymity takes away the attractive power of stake and the ability to influence the platform past the voting. Influence comes in many forms and like it or not, the having of stake is one factor.
I am interested in how behaviors might change as from as far as I can tell, if one was to compare the difference in behavior between the "known" and "anon" accounts when it comes to bad actors, I would say there is a clear bias toward the anon. Would masking stake make it more prevalent?